You’ve overlooked that other migration — that of the southern democratic racists to the republican party, haven’t you? Along with all those pesky laws that the democratic sponsored, passed and enacted that have kept them in line?
I looked it up…
what he said…
After the Civil War, the “Radical Republicans,” who oversaw the Reconstruction of the South, brought blacks into electoral politics. Blacks naturally joined the GOP rather than the white supremacist Southern Democrats. In these golden years, black Republicans got the vote and even won elective office. (Mississippi elected the nation’s first African-American senator in 1870.) Led by the GOP, the nation ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which ended slavery and gave black men full citizenship and the franchise.
The GOP’s abandonment of African-Americans began with the presidential election of 1876. The party had already been subordinating its agenda of black equality to that of cultivating Northern industrialists when Ohio Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, to resolve a contested election, agreed to the notorious Compromise of 1876. In exchange for the support of Southern Democrats, Hayes promised to withdraw federal troops from the South and stop supervising the treatment of blacks. White supremacist, or “redeemer,” Democrats quickly regained power, commencing the bloody reign of Jim Crow.
The compromise of 1876 crippled black Republicanism in the South. State Republican parties, to compete for white votes, engaged in racial me-tooism. They purged blacks from the party or shunted them into “Black and Tan” delegations, which for decades had to compete with “Lily White” delegations for recognition by national Republican leaders.
By the Progressive Era, both the Republicans and the Democrats were showing little interest in helping African-Americans. One issue that couldn’t be ignored — though the parties tried — was the horror of lynching, which had become rampant in the post-Reconstruction South. Anti-lynching laws marked the last major civil rights issue on which Republicans were out in front.
In 1920 Congressman Leonidas Dyer, a Missouri Republican from a largely black St. Louis district, introduced an anti-lynching bill. The new Republican president, Warren Harding, endorsed it. And the House passed it in January 1922, with support from all but seventeen Republicans.
Yet even though they controlled the Senate as well, the GOP couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pull out the stops to pass the bill into law. While Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts supported the bill, the powerful Idaho Republican William Borah opposed it. Borah believed the measure amounted to interference with the states’ autonomy and he helped Southern Democrats kill it. Eventually, Borah’s states’ rights ideology would come to dominate the GOP, at the expense of Lodge’s racial liberalism.
Meanwhile, blacks were fleeing the South for Northern cities. There, the Democrats’ political machines delivered services and patronage to immigrants in exchange for their votes, and Democratic bosses shrewdly absorbed blacks into their system. The Republicans, in contrast, failed to do so. Their machines reacted coolly to black voters’ demands and to black politicians’ ambitions — leading many to leave the party. A shift in party loyalties was beginning.
The realignment crystallized under President Franklin Roosevelt. In 1932, FDR won just 23 percent of the black vote. Yet he swiftly moved to bolster his black support. Gestures such as consulting a “black cabinet” of unofficial African-American advisers surely helped, but more important were his economic relief programs. The Depression hit black Americans disproportionately hard, and FDR’s relief programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works Administration, gave them much-needed aid and jobs.
In Congress, meanwhile, Northern and Western Democrats took the lead on progressive racial legislation; it was two Democrats who in 1934 introduced the next major anti-lynching bill. Between 1932 and 1936, writes historian Nancy J. Weiss in Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR, “Roosevelt and the New Deal changed the voting habits of black Americans in ways that have lasted to our own time.” Some Republicans still groped for black ballots. In a polarized party, liberal leaders, such as presidential nominees Wendell Willkie and Thomas Dewey, incorporated pro-civil-rights language into the platforms, temporarily besting the conservative Old Guard.
But even they could not match the new Democratic President, Harry Truman, on civil rights. Truman won 70 percent of the black vote in 1948 with a bold, progressive racial agenda. He supported a Fair Employment Practices Commission to fight job discrimination and desegregated the military by executive order. In 1948 he ran on a civil rights platform that drove South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond to run as a “Dixiecrat” and many Southerners to support him.
By the 1950s racial liberalism in the GOP was fading fast. Dwight Eisenhower was a conservative (though not a reactionary) on race who opposed Truman on key issues. In 1945 Eisenhower testified before Congress against integrating the military, and as president he resisted reviving the FEPC. He opposed the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education, which ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. (Bowing to the inevitable, the 1956 GOP platform endorsed Brown.) Ike remarked that “you cannot change people’s hearts merely by laws” — repeatedly justifying his inaction in the face of rising demands for civil rights laws.
Entering the 1960 election, the Democrats, behind such leaders as Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Herbert Lehman of New York, had become the unquestioned party of civil rights. Richard Nixon, who always overestimated his own popularity with blacks, still expected to fare well — Jackie Robinson, for one, endorsed him — and he probably had a stronger civil rights record than John F. Kennedy. But JFK courted the black vote, famously phoning Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife, Coretta, when the civil rights leader was jailed. While the importance of that gesture has been overstated, it highlighted the Democrats’ realization that blacks constituted a key part of their base.
Racial liberalism within the GOP enjoyed its last hurrah during the battle over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Lyndon Johnson and his congressional allies decided the time was ripe to pass a meaningful bill, their Southern party-mates be damned. While the Republican leadership took a wait-and-see position, younger GOP congressmen such as New York’s John Lindsay (who later became a Democrat) and Maryland’s Charles Mathias worked on the bill, helping it to passage in the House over Southern opposition.
In the Senate, Southern Democrats undertook a filibuster, which boded ill; never had civil rights advocates mustered the two-thirds supermajority needed to close off debate. At first, few Republican senators were willing to vote to end the filibuster. But behind the scenes Vice President Hubert Humphrey negotiated with Republican leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois, a supporter of the bill. Dirksen promised to round up enough Republican holdouts if Humphrey would attach amendments paying lip service to state and local control. After more than two months the Senate voted 71-29 for cloture, with six Republicans joining twenty-three Southern Democrats in opposition (forty-four Democrats and twenty-seven Republicans voted aye).
Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the Democrat who led the opposition, said Dirksen had “killed off a rapidly growing Republican Party in the South.” But Russell had it backwards. Significantly, the opponents of the 1964 law included the GOP’s future leaders, including Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and Texas Senate aspirant George H.W. Bush. They knew their electoral success depended on conservative support in the South and West.
Goldwater’s “Operation Dixie” in his 1964 presidential race may have meant surrendering the black vote; LBJ won 94 percent that year. But it bore fruit four years later. Richard Nixon’s successful “Southern Strategy” of 1968 became the blueprint for Ronald Reagan’s Southern inroads and Lee Atwater and George Bush’s Willie Hortonism. Indeed, for the last thirty-five years, the GOP strategy has been to write off the black vote and seek white support by (among other methods) subtly playing on racial fears.
If, then, George W. Bush, running under the guidance of Atwater’s protégé Karl Rove, can reverse that trend it will be more than a change in his party’s line. He will be declaring, truly, that this is not his father’s Republican Party.
David Greenberg
Note too that the returning blacks “tend to be more educated than those who never left the region”. You don’t have to wonder why — here’s what your >“tax rates, a tendency to favor markets over state intervention” will get you.
